In the Long Run

I received a letter from my childhood chum, Terry, recently. She had enclosed a folded, yellowed paper titled, “Letter to the Future.” The page contained several questions, each followed by lines for the respondent’s answers.

I grinned as I recognized the scrawled answers punctuated with plentiful exclamation marks as my own, completed when I was about 13 or so. I vaguely recalled that Terry and I had been in a church youth group class, and had completed this page during a lesson that was probably designed to help us remember the past, but set goals and plan for the future. Somehow she had kept this page all these years, and now had sent it to me.

I read that I had eaten Cheerios for breakfast that morning, and that my favorite subject in school was band, and my worst subject was science. My favorite song was “Leaving On a Jet Plane” by Peter, Paul, and Mary, and I disliked household chores. I wanted to buy a palomino (I don’t remember being “horsey” at that age), my hobby was spying on people (some day I’ll have to write about our G.O.O.S.E. club—the Girls’Organization Of Secret Espionage), and I was infatuated with a boy named Milton.

I was a little embarrassed to read how silly or trite some of my answers had been. Surely I had been more mature than that?! It was also discomfiting that I had left unanswered some of the questions that required deeper thought, or self-analysis. (Perhaps I was a little harsh in judging my Seminary students in my previous blog, Desired Things.)

I smiled and shook my head at that young and giggly, carefree and self-absorbed, girl. In some ways, she has changed a lot, but not so much in others. I still groan about household chores, I still find science difficult to understand, and I still live life with exclamation marks!

Posted by Cyppy at 10:44 PM